A post of mine is still pending in Texas Dyslexia Teachers and Therapists.
This is what I wrote:
“A majority of kids classified as dyslexic are shut down kids. They disengage from learning to read due to confusion.”
The group says it was formed for dyslexia teachers and therapists to collaborate and share experiences and ideas. Anyone in that group could have asked me to explain the sentence, or to show the children I have taught. Instead, the post sits pending. The admin has not said what is wrong with it.
This is not an isolated case. It has been going on for more than a decade.
In Dyslexia Support Group for Parents my profile has been suspended. The admin has turned off my ability to post, comment, and earn contribution points until 30 October 2026. The date is extended each time the deadline approaches.
In Parents Dyslexia & ADHD Support Group the same thing: suspended until 12 October 2026.
Other dyslexia groups block the posts outright. The same pattern appears on Twitter. A question is not answered. The account is blocked.
The people who need the observation are the parents. They are the ones kept from it.
What the pending sentence actually means
Since 2004 I have taught more than 80 children labelled dyslexic, one to one. Many of them could already read Malay, or Mandarin written in Pinyin. Both use the same 26 letters as English. They did not struggle with those. They struggled with English.
They are not lazy and they are not stupid. They are logical. They expect a letter to stand for the sound they were taught. When B is taught as “buh”, M as “muh”, and F as “fuh”, they apply the rule. If F is “fuh” and o-x is “ox”, then fox must be “fuh-ox”. If M is “muh” and a-n is “an”, then man must be “muh-an”. The spoken word does not match. The mind treats the lesson as nonsense and checks out. The child is still in the room. He is no longer listening.
That is the shut-down I have watched in front of me. About 80 percent of children push through the confusion and learn to read anyway. A smaller group does not. Those children are screened, labelled, and sent into years of therapy. I believe true dyslexia is a small minority, well under the “1 in 5” figure repeated every Dyslexia Awareness Month. The rest are instructional casualties: children confused by consonants taught with an added vowel sound, and by rules that are never reconciled.
The same children re-engage when the confusion is removed. Teach the consonant with no extraneous sound. Tell them plainly that English letters can have more than one sound, and show the pattern. Ask them to unlearn the wrong pronunciation. In my experience many of these labelled children read fluently within months, not years.
I have written this up since 2010 on dyslexiafriend.com, including “Why kids shut down / disengage from learning to read”. The short book,Teach Your Child to Read, is on Amazon as a Kindle copy at $2.99 — a fraction of the cost of the programmes sold to parents of “dyslexics”. Thousands of desperate parents never hear of it, because the groups they join will not let the post through.(For those from Malaysia and India you can buy the book here. LINK )
All of this is done in the name of helping mothers who are frightened for their children. What those mothers actually meet, once they enter the groups, is screening for dyslexia, dyslexia therapy, special tuition, and in some cases medication. A contrary classroom observation — that most of the labelled children shut down from confusion, and can be taught to read once that confusion is lifted — is left pending, suspended, or blocked.
If the claim is wrong, the remedy is simple. Ask for the explanation. Ask which children, taught which way, started to read. Do not leave the sentence in a queue and do not switch off the account of the person who wrote it.
Illiteracy will not fall while the only permitted account is the one that leads to screening, therapy, and fees, and while the parents who need another explanation are prevented from seeing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment